- In this chapter, we will be doing a workflow projectwhere we will begin with the raw filesas they appeared straight out of the camera,and we'll process those files here in Lightroom.Then we'll take a look at how we canbring those images over into Photoshopin order to combine the best expressionsout of these two photographs together.Lemme set up the scenario a little bit for you.Here, you can see I have a portrait,and this is a portrait that I capturedin Kauai on Hanalei Beach.It's a photograph of my friend Mike, and also his mom.And if we zoom in on the image using the Navigator panel,here I'll zoom in to, say, a one-to-three view,which will work well, at least on the monitorthat I'm using here, you can see thatMike's mom looks great, but Mike is lookingoff to the right a little bit.

It's almost like something must have distracted him.Fortunately, I captured a picture right after this moment.Now Mike's looking at the camera,but I don't like his mom's expression as much.So what I wanna do, what we're going to do in this project,is combine the best expressionsout of these two photographs into one image.And all of this will begin here in Lightroom.If you don't use Lightroom,you could do the same thing in Camera Raw.Alright, well first, let's go ahead and selectboth of these images down here in the filmstrip below.So we'll click on one of them,hold down the Command key on a Mac,Control on Windows, and click on another.

That will show you in the filmstrip down here,let me make that a little bit bigger so you can see that,that we have both images, which are now selected.Next, we'll go to the Develop moduleby clicking on the Develop module picker.Now, in the Develop module, what we wanna dois change our synchronize settings.So if you click on the button which reads Sync...,dots in Adobe applications means dialog.So click on that, it will open up a dialog,and it will say, "Hey, what do you wanna synchronize?"I wanna synchronize everything.So we'll choose Check All.

And the reason why we want to do thisis because we want both of these imagesto appear identical in regards to our raw processing,so that we can then blend them togethermuch easier once we get to Photoshop.So here, we'll click on Synchronize,and that basically just set that up for us.And what we'll do next is turn on Auto Syncby clicking on the flip switch,which allows us to change Sync to Auto Sync.Once we have Auto Sync turned on,if we make an adjustment to one image,lemme make an adjustmentwhich will look a little bit strange.

Here you can see I made this image blue.You can see that it's now affecting both files here.So any adjustment that we make here will affect both images.I'm gonna go ahead and minimize the filmstrip,because we don't really need to see that.But what we do need to do is focus inon this great mother-son photograph.And in this image, I wanna makejust a few minor adjustments.I'll go ahead and warm this file upby dragging my Temperature sliderto the right just a little bit there.I'm gonna bring up my Exposure as well,and also a little bit of Contrast.

I'm gonna bring some light into those shadows,just dragging this slider up,you can see how we can illuminate those shadows.The highlights are getting a bit too bright,so we'll drop those back down.We can recover some of the detail that we have there.You can see how I'm bringing backsome detail in the background,and just makes for a nicer look in the picture.And here, as I'm processing this image,really I'm making subjective adjustments.There's nothing which is right or wrong at this point,rather just trying to get this photographto the place where I want it to be.I want it to be this, kind of a warm imagewith beautiful colors, so we'll go downto our Clarity slider and addjust a little bit of midtone contrast,and then bring up our Vibrance to bring backsome of the colors that were desaturatedwhen we brought up contrast.

And then just bring in a little bit of color saturation too.Nothing major, nothing revolutionary here,some basic processing in Lightroom.Let's look at the before and after.Here it is, the before,and then I'll tap the backslash key again,and now you can see the after.And just to make sure, what we wanna dois go between our two images.To do that, you can use your arrow keys.So here I'll tap the left arrow key,and you can see now I'm at the first image.And I can go back and forth between theseby tapping the right and the left arrow keys.

You also may wanna zoom out and just make surethat everything looks good in the overall photograph here.Well, we can see that the alignmentof the photograph isn't perfect, right?Because I was hand-holding this,capturing this image at the beach.And that's fine.We'll be able to align things and blend things togetherin a moment when we get to Photoshop.Well, we have accomplished the first step.The first step was all about defining the project,and then making some basic adjustments to our photographs,either in Lightroom or Camera Raw.

Now let's move to the next step.

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Released

1/23/2015

Group shots are fun but complicated assignments to shoot; you need to make sure that you have the entire group's attention and that everyone looks great. Luckily, what you can't get right in-camera, you can fix in post, with the power of Photoshop and Lightroom. In this short Portrait Project, Chris Orwig takes you through the process of fixing and enhancing three group portraits: a casual beach snapshot, a studio portrait, and a wedding-party photo. Using these tips, you'll be able to get the best expression out of each member of the group.